Today ismy 20th anniversary of covering poke and poke engines. Tomark the occasion, I wanted to reflect on the little of the big changesthat Ive seen over the past dual decades of covering the space.

1. The poke revolution

Chances are, the first resource you turn to if you have the question about something is the poke engine, whether it be Google, Siri, Bing, Yelp, others or the combination of services.

This simple act that you likely dont think twice about was the highly revolutionary change to how people sought information. Before popular consumer-focused poke engines emerged just over 20 years ago, people got answers the same way they had for hundreds and thousands of years: largely by asking other people.

If you indispensable an answer, you turned to people like the teacher, the professional, the best crony or the librarian.Sure, there were also collection to use: libraries, library catalogs, Yellow Pages and professional databases like LexisNexis. But for mostpeople, getting an answer to many questions meant asking others.

Enter poke engines, the brand new best friends that seemed to have an answer for anything you needed. They revolutionized how you gather informationin the way the smartphone altered how you promulgate yet, unlike the smartphone, poke has been the quiet revolution. Perhaps it seemed so healthy that you didnt think to be in awe of the profound change it delivered.